The present disclosure relates generally to detecting movement of objects to infer a presence of a living being. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to adaptively adjusting a threshold associated with sensor measurements used to detect a movement of objects to infer presence of a living being.
This section is intended to introduce the reader to various aspects of art that may be related to various aspects of the present disclosure, which are described and/or claimed below. This discussion is believed to be helpful in providing the reader with background information to facilitate a better understanding of the various aspects of the present disclosure. Accordingly, it should be understood that these statements are to be read in this light, and not as admissions of prior art.
Various types of smart electronic devices may control temperatures, detect hazardous environments, or perform other functions in a building such as a home or office. These electronic devices may vary their operation depending on whether a human being is occupying the building. For example, the electronic devices may save energy by efficiently controlling certain environmental properties, such as temperature, based on whether a human being is present in the building. To detect the presence of the human being, one or more of the electronic devices may use an occupancy sensor (e.g., a passive infrared (PIR) sensor) to sense the presence of the human when measurements acquired by the sensors exceed a certain occupancy threshold.
Yet no occupancy sensor is perfect. Indeed, each occupancy sensor may produce measurement signals that include some level of noise. As a result, the electronic devices may be programmed to use an occupancy threshold that is greater than the expected noise level of its occupancy sensor to avoid false positives due to noise. The actual amount of noise from any given occupancy sensor, however, may vary substantially over the course of time due to, e.g., changing environmental conditions (i.e., temperature, humidity, etc.), sensor degradation, changes in battery level, etc. Moreover, the amount of noise produced by different occupancy sensors may vary even in the same environmental conditions due to, e.g, manufacturing tolerance levels. Thus, to avoid false positives in any of the electronic devices, the occupancy thresholds may be selected based on the noisiest occupancy sensors that may be found in the electronic devices. As a result of having unnecessarily high occupancy thresholds, many electronic devices may have an undesirably low occupancy detection sensitivity.